>On Tue, Jan 25, 2000 at 10:09:13AM -0700, Keith Causey wrote:
>> Where did you find the SPO-256 and CTS-256 chipset?
>
>I'll chip in (!) here and mention that Radio Shack was selling these
>chipsets many years ago. I even went and bought one.
>
>I could never get it to work reliably over the serial interface because
>it did not generate XON/XOFF properly. I remember fiddling with it for
>long hours, and I found that it generated an XON character for every
>character you sent to it, until some internal buffer was full, then it
>stopped sending XON.
>
>Does anyone have a data sheet on these chips? I was following Radio
>Shack's experimenter's data sheet, which may have been abbreviated.
>
>I'd love to get this thing working.

Hi All!

This reminded me of a funny story concerning this chip. It was many
years ago and Radio Shack was selling this part with a speech rom that
had only numbers and a few other words (for use in making a talking
digital clock). I had spent one saturday afternoon chatting on a BBS.
The topic of the day was some satanic cult that was causing problems
in the area (dead cats and such).
It was about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning I had finished a proto board
using the Radio Shack SPO256 chip set and I was trying to get it to
work. I had it plugged into an audio amplifier and every time I gave
it a command to speak, It would just produce silence. Then I would
turn up the volume a little bit to make sure that I SHOULD be hearing
something. At the same time I was thinking about this Satan Worship
stuff from earlier that day. Well I must have touched the right thing
on the circuit board because all of a sudden (At now full volume) This
little proto board came to life with ONE...TWO...THREE..... In a very
robotic voice!!! I nearly pooped my pants. I thought the earth had
opened and Satan himself was com ming to get me. I turned everything
off, put my heart back in my chest and went to bed vowing never to
work that late again.

>I nearly pooped my pants. I thought the earth had
> opened and Satan himself was com ming to get me. I turned everything
> off, put my heart back in my chest and went to bed vowing never to
> work that late again.

Good thing you hadn't keyed in "666", you'd probably still be running! :)

At least it didn't follow up the counting sequence with some dark laughter
"HA HA HA HA HAAA" ;-)

This reminds me of a situation where a friend of mine was working on an
electronics project to enter in a competition. His idea was a device to aid
someone in doing CPR in an emergency <G>. It consisted of a 16C84 and an
ISD sound chip, all packaged in the case of a computer speaker with a few
buttons added to the front. It would present menus of options such as "Is
the victim a child? Press the left button if yes, the right button if no."
and interactively give you the appropriate instructions.

Besides the basic idea being a bit iffy, it had some rather funny quirks
(which wouldn't be very funny in a real cardiac arrest situation!).

First off, he was powering up the ISD chip at the same time as the PIC, so
sometimes the ISD chip would get go to the wrong address (but it was always
the same address range) on startup. So, to detect that problem, he recorded
"RESET! RESET! RESET!" on that area of the chip and provided a reset button
on the front panel. I can just see it now, someone goes down and you pull
out your trusty CPR helper and hear "RESET! RESET! RESET!"

Secondly, because he recorded the various messages at different times,
their volume and tone of voice would vary, often in strange ways. It always
started out with the phrase, "LAY THE VICTIM ON THEIR BACK!" in a very loud
tone, followed by a much softer "chech their airway" or somesuch.

During the CPR period, it would time breaths for you by remaining silent
and then suddenly saying "Give a breath!" and then going back silent for
several seconds. I can just see this thing left innocently in a room where
someone was sitting, only suddnely to hear "Give a breath!" or "LAY THE
VICTIM ON THEIR BACK!"

Finally, it would sometimes go to the wrong message (I don't know if the
code was bad or if it just wasn't finished when he was showing it to me) so
it would ask if the victim was a child, and even when you said yes, it
would then proceede to some instruction which was only appropriate for an
adult.

Sean

At 03:51 PM 1/28/00 -0800, you wrote:
>Hi All!
>
>This reminded me of a funny story concerning this chip. It was many
[SNIP]{Quote hidden}

>on the circuit board because all of a sudden (At now full volume) This
>little proto board came to life with ONE...TWO...THREE..... In a very
>robotic voice!!! I nearly pooped my pants. I thought the earth had
>opened and Satan himself was com ming to get me. I turned everything
>off, put my heart back in my chest and went to bed vowing never to
>work that late again.
>
>Regards
>
>Dave Duley
>
|

I actually know of a piece of commercial software (Autodesk Animator)
which, at least the way that we had it set up, when one of the drawing
tools was selected and you moved the cursor out of the drawing window,
display a constant "x=666,y=666" as the coordinates!!! We never figured out
if it was a conincidence or a joke.